Finding something alive and still on the internet, it’s not the passive and peaceful knowing of finding a creature in the woods or a bird in the garden. So far removed, no – completely absent is the familiar feeling of knowing what I’ve just found might still have a beating hard tomorrow or the day afterwards. Alive, and breathing – a piece of art, a community, something left over from Before as if a cataclysm had struck in one of those airport fantasy novels I always look at on long flights but never read, that’s the feeling.

Hawken is a battlefield, in my mind. No, hold on, I mean Hawakening – that’s the ticket for the ride I want to take. A free to play shooter with a version on its own client ran, owned and operated by the ever encroaching doomed fan-base for nothing more then hot air exchanged over microphones, bluster followed by a targeted rocket payload. I frequently feel it in me, hooks and claws offering me unlimited pleasure for now – a brief spike of something loaded and fired directly into my mind with no price tag accompanying. I also frequently found myself dragged again to the client by friends who are more obsessed with it than I can pay to be.

I used to think in some small measure about grand plans and a forward momentum. Real horseshit cribbed by the types of people grown up in Rural America trapped in a perpetual kind of survival loop – wake up, get the cash, drink, make it to tomorrow. Find in some sense of that real a way of expressing ourselves, ritualized digital murder, clown based fraternity violence, football homo in wrangler jeans and cowboy hats grasping at daddies own masculinity – all the little clubs and social groups forced to hang out with each other.

To tell you the truth, and nobody is looking right now so I feel safe saying this, but just between you and I? It was always a little more fun to meet strangers on the internet. Dangerous, too, and I’ll still learn how to pay for that unfettered internet access I got my hands around as a young teenager before I make for anyone else pay for it, but friendship is found in battlefield lobbies, as well as literal, Battlefield Lobbies.

Half of the reason an older generation wont shut the fuck up about Battlefield 2 is because it had little social pools to fall into in every hosted lobby, just like the whole generation of games found before it. I might be so bad at a game like that that I frequently find myself in a “wrong place, wrong time” situation facing down my own lack of responsibility, but at least when Waocats kills me I recognize the timbre of his voice laughing at me over the headset.

Hawken isn’t a battlefield, it’s a no rules mech based water polo club with frequent breaks – large enough is the small community that’s still keeping it awake that there’s a discord frequented by around a hundred people and regular Saturday night melees catching one or two of the hosted servers to be filled to the absolute brim, with strangers that I hate to say I’ve gotten to know. I might never ask them how the kids are, but I’m no longer looking through the scope at an avatar, and it’s awfully more fun to pull the trigger on a person when you know how they act when a kill streak gets cut short quick.

DEEP HELL PRESENTS – GAME OF THE YEAR
four games inexorably linked (to each other) in ways I can’t talk about

they might hurt yourself

Marvel Rivals though, is an addiction created during the primary circumstances of my life. I see how easy it is to fall into these little cycles of software: digital battle passes and premium currencies that are tethered to more and more little upticks in rewards and victories.Rivals might be more of a treadmill than Overwatch – much of the battles in quick play lobbies qualify for theatrical stagings, real players vs. bot lobbies that seem to be crewed that way to ensure even low skill players pick up victories after strings of defeats and lock outs. It is everything videogames aspire to be now: it’s own god damned ecosystem. It’s often said in the comic book aisles that companies don’t make comics so much as they buy shelf space, and that’s just as true in videogames: how long can we get you playing, and are you spending money? I’m always spending money, a three star jackpot with the Marvel characters as often as possible.

For saying that certain games are ahead of their time, Hawken has more of this constantly emerging tech-war as the backdrop: the same kind of far-flung science fiction where swords are guns and guys are still wearing big suits of armor. Hawken is mostly renaissance fare: we’re in matches and our flags and decals are more literal. I’ve got maybe three choises to start. Now hold on, I have to list something here: what’s the difference between street fighter and Street Fighter.

This week the game, made fully open to the new developers added Capture the Flag, a feature that didn’t exist in the original. The body of Hawken seems like more material to work with: and yet the scene currently supporting the game wont exist forever. the dreaded Esports laced through it in a way that’s less sinister. Small enough to get caught in barbs from the locals when you get close. I live through a few matches with a stranger and we might decide to compete, if I live to see the next round with them.

The strangers have faces, and the names are now no longer a crytograph that speaks to me in half remembered memes and smurf accounts. I know I have to keep pressing the button on matches, keep logging in on Saturdays, keep my eye close. If I look away, only one of the contenders will make it a few more months.

HAWKEN and MARVEL RIVALS are recipients of A KEIGHLEY – an award that we’ve decided to give out yearly at Deep Hell Dot Com for games that are special in ways that run deeper then our hearts or what we feel like playing them. We deserve Hawken and more of them, but: the future remains unchanged, and it will be another half decade of premium skins and battle passes. One, seemingly cannot exist without the other: an award for every category. When one closes down by summertime next year, will there be more articles from people celebrating it, or saying that it was a sad example of not enough fans supporting something? It seems harder and harder to cover projects like these as anything other than a eulogy.

Next year, it’s possible that time, like all things, will come for Hawken as much as it is that Marvel Rivals bleeds players every night post launch unless the treadmill keeps going. One will be sustained by people seeking it out, and the other will be sustained because it’ll be in every YouTube and Facebook short and five second vid-vertisement that can sell shelf space. Will it be on stage as the best hero-shooter of the year at The Game Awards, coasting on the public perception to always being willing to choke down more Marvel in any form, supported by the lobbies full of teenagers eked inside by the comfortable bright colors of recognizable media properties? Here we find ourselves asking at the end of the year: is there no more room in hell for videogames?